Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (68 page)

“But, bless you, that was
the least of it! I told you about the snow. The snowfall had stopped at nine o’clock
in the evening, hours and hours before Mrs. Waycross was murdered. When the
police came, there were only two separate sets of footprints in the great
unmarked half-acre of snow round the house. One set belonged to Mr. Wilkes, who
had come up and looked in through the window the night before. The other
belonged to Mrs. Randall. The police could follow and explain both sets of
tracks; but there were no other tracks at all, and no-one was hiding in the
house.”

“Of course, it was absurd
to suspect Mr. Wilkes. It was not only that he told a perfectly straight story
about the man in the tall hat; but both Dr. Sutton and Mr. Pawley, who drove
back with him from Five Ashes, were there to swear he could not have done it.
You understand, he came no closer to the house than the windows of this room.
They could watch every step he made in the moonlight, and they did. Afterwards
he drove home with Dr. Sutton and slept there; or, I should say, they continued
their terrible drinking until daylight. It is true that they found in his
possession a knife with blood on it, but he explained that he had used the
knife to gut a rabbit.”

“It was the same with
poor Mrs. Randall, who had been up all night about her midwife’s duties, though
naturally it was even more absurd to think of
her.
But there were no other footprints at all, either
coming to or going from the house, in all that stretch of snow; and all the
ways in or out were locked on the inside.”

It was Muriel who spoke
then, in a voice that tried to be crisp, but wavered in spite of her. “Are you
telling us that all this is true?” she demanded.

“I am teasing you a
little, my dear,” said the other. “But really and truly, it all did happen.
Perhaps I will show you in a moment.”

“I suppose it was really
the husband who did it?” asked Muriel in a bored tone.

“Poor Mr. Waycross!” said
their hostess tenderly. “He spent that night in a temperance hotel near Charing
Cross Station, as he always did, and, of course, he never left it. When he
learned about his wife’s duplicity”—again Hunter thought she was going to pull
down a corner of her eyelid— “it nearly drove him out of his mind, poor fellow.
I think he gave up agricultural machinery and took to preaching, but I am not
sure. I know he left the district soon afterwards, and before he left he
insisted on burning the mattress of their bed. It was a dreadful scandal.”

“But in that case,” insisted
Hunter, “who did kill her? And, if there were no footprints and all the doors
were locked, how did the murderer come or go? Finally, if all this happened in
February, what does it have to do with people being out of the house on
Christmas Eve?”

“Ah, that is the real
story. That is what I meant to tell you.”

She grew very subdued.

“It must have been very
interesting to watch the people alter and grow older, or find queer paths, in
the years afterwards. For, of course, nothing did happen as yet. The police
presently gave it all up; for decency’s sake it was allowed to rest. There was
a new pump built in the market square; and the news of the Prince of Wales’s
going to India in ‘75 to talk about; and presently a new family came to live at
‘Clearlawns’, and began to raise their children. The trees and the rains in
summer were just the same, you know. It must have been seven or eight years
before anything happened, for Jane Waycross was very patient.”

“Several of the people
had died in the meantime. Mrs. Randall had, in a fit of quinsy; and so had Dr.
Sutton, but that was a great mercy, because he fell by the way when he was
going to perform an amputation with too much of the drink in him. But Mr.
Pawley had prospered—and, above all, so had Mr. Wilkes. He had become an even
finer figure of a man, they tell me, as he drew near middle age. When he
married he gave up all his loose habits. Yes, he married; it was the Tinsley
heiress, Miss Linshaw, whom he had been courting at the time of the murder; and
I have heard that poor Jane Waycross, even after
she
was married to Mr. Waycross, used to bite her pillow
at night, because she was so horribly jealous of Miss Linshaw.”

“Mr. Wilkes had always
been tall, and now he was finely stout. He always wore frock-coats. Though he
had lost most of his hair, his beard was full and curly; he had twinkling black
eyes, and twinkling ruddy cheeks, and a bluff voice. All the children ran to
him. They say he broke as many feminine hearts as before. At any wholesome
entertainment he was always the first to lead the cotillion or applaud the
fiddler, and I do not know what hostesses would have done without him.”

“On Christmas Eve,
then—remember, I am not sure of the date—the Fentons gave a Christmas party.
The Fentons were the very nice family who had taken this house afterwards, you
know. There was to be no dancing, but all the old games. Naturally, Mr. Wilkes
was the first of all to be invited, and the first to accept; for everything was
all smoothed away by time, like the wrinkles in last year’s counterpane; and
what’s past
is
past,
or so they say. They had decorated the house with holly and mistletoe, and
guests began to arrive as early as two in the afternoon.”

“I had all this from Mrs.
Fenton’s aunt (one of the Warwickshire Abbotts), who was actually staying here
at the time. In spite of such a festal season, the preparations had not been
going at all well that day, though such preparations usually did. Miss Abbott
complained that there was a nasty earthy smell in the house. It was a dark and
raw day, and the chimneys did not seem to draw as well as they should. What is
more, Mrs. Fenton cut her finger when she was carving the cold fowl, because
she said one of the children had been hiding behind the window-curtains in
here, and peeping out at her; she was very angry. But Mr. Fenton, who was going
about the house in his carpet slippers before the arrival of the guests, called
her ‘Mother’ and said that it was Christmas.”

“It is certainly true
that they forgot all about this when the fun of the games began. Such
squealings you never heard!—or so I am told. Foremost of all at Bobbing for
Apples or Nuts in May was Mr. Jeremy Wilkes. He stood, gravely paternal, in the
midst of everything, with his ugly wife beside him, and stroked his beard. He
saluted each of the ladies on the cheek under the mistletoe; there was also
some scampering to salute him; and, though he
did
remain for longer than was necessary behind the
window-curtains with the younger Miss Twigelow, his wife only smiled. There was
only one unpleasant incident, soon forgotten. Towards dusk a great gusty wind
began to come up, with the chimneys smoking worse than usual. It being nearly
dark, Mr. Fenton said it was time to fetch in the Snapdragon Bowl, and watch it
flame. You know the game? It is a great bowl of lighted spirit, and you must
thrust in your hand and pluck out a raisin from the bottom without scorching
your fingers. Mr. Fenton carried it in on a tray in the half-darkness; it was
flickering with that bluish flame you have seen on Christmas puddings. Miss
Abbott said that once, in carrying it, he started and turned round. She said
that for a second she thought there was a face looking over his shoulder, and
it wasn’t a nice face.”

“Later in the evening,
when the children were sleepy and there was tissue-paper scattered all over the
house, the grown-ups began their games in earnest. Someone suggested Blind Man’s
Buff. They were mostly using the hall and this room here, as having more space
than the dining-room. Various members of the party were blindfolded with men’s
handkerchiefs; but there was a dreadful amount of cheating. Mr. Fenton grew
quite annoyed about it, because the ladies almost always caught Mr. Wilkes when
they could; Mr. Wilkes was laughing and perspiring heartily, and his great
cravat with the silver pin had almost come loose.”

“To make it certain
nobody could cheat, Mr. Fenton got a little white linen bag—like this one. It
was the pillow-cover off the baby’s cot, really; and he said nobody could look
through that if it were tied over the head.”

“I should explain that
they had been having some trouble with the lamp in this room. Mr. Fenton said: ‘Confound
it, Mother, what is wrong with that lamp? Turn up the wick, will you?’ It was
really quite a good lamp from Spence and Minstead’s, and should not have burned
so dull as it did. In the confusion, while Mrs. Fenton was trying to make the
light better, and he was looking over his shoulder at her, Mr. Fenton had been
rather absently fastening the bag on the head of the last person caught. He has
said since that he did not notice who it was. No-one else noticed, either, the
light being so dim and there being such a large number of people. It seemed to
be a girl in a broad bluish kind of dress, standing over near the door.”

“Perhaps you know how
people act when they have just been blindfolded in this game. First they
usually stand very still, as though they were smelling or sensing in which
direction to go. Sometimes they make a sudden jump, or sometimes they begin to
shuffle gently forward. Everyone noticed what an air of
purpose
there seemed to be about this person whose face was
covered; she went forward very slowly, and seemed to crouch down a bit.”

“It began to move towards
Mr. Wilkes in very short but quick little jerks, the white bag bobbing on its
face. At this time Mr. Wilkes was sitting at the end of the table, laughing,
with his face pink above the beard, and a glass of our Kentish cider in his
hand. I want you to imagine this room as being very dim, and much more
cluttered, what with all the tassels they had on the furniture then; and the
high-piled hair of the ladies, too. The hooded person got to the edge of the
table. It began to edge along towards Mr. Wilkes’s chair; and then it jumped.”

“Mr. Wilkes got up and
skipped (yes, skipped) out of its way, laughing. It waited quietly, after which
it went, in the same slow way, towards him again. It nearly got him again, by
the edge of the potted plant. All this time it did not say anything, you
understand, although everyone was applauding it and crying encouraging advice.
It kept its head down. Miss Abbott says she began to notice an unpleasant faint
smell of burnt cloth or something worse, which turned her half-ill. By the time
the hooded person came stooping clear across the room, as certainly as though
it could see him, Mr. Wilkes was not laughing any longer.”

“In the corner by one
bookcase, he said out loud: ‘I’m tired of this silly, rotten game; go away, do
you hear?’ Nobody there had ever heard him speak like that, in such a loud,
wild way, but they laughed and thought it must be the Kentish cider. ‘Go away!’
cried Mr. Wilkes again, and began to strike at it with his fist. All this time,
Miss Abbott says, she had observed his face gradually changing. He dodged
again, very pleasant and nimble for such a big man, but with the perspiration
running down his face. Back across the room he went again, with it following
him; and he cried out something that most naturally shocked them all
inexpressibly.”

“He screamed out: ‘For
God’s sake, Fenton, take it off me!’”

“And for the last time
the thing jumped.”

“They were over near the
curtains of that bay window, which were drawn as they are now. Miss Twigelow,
who was nearest, says that Mr. Wilkes could not have seen anything, because the
white bag was still drawn over the woman’s head. The only thing she noticed was
that at the lower part of the bag, where the face must have been, there was a
curious kind of discoloration, a stain of some sort which had not been there
before: something seemed to be seeping through. Mr. Wilkes fell back between
the curtains, with the hooded person after him, and screamed again. There was a
kind of thrashing noise in or behind the curtains; then they fell straight
again, and everything grew quiet.”

“Now, our Kentish cider
is very strong, and for a moment Mr. Fenton did not know what to think. He
tried to laugh at it, but the laugh did not sound well. Then he went over to
the curtains, calling out gruffly to them to come out of there and not play the
fool. But, after he had looked inside the curtains, he turned round very
sharply and asked the rector to get the ladies out of the room. This was done,
but Miss Abbott often said that she had one quick peep inside. Though the bay
windows were locked on the inside, Mr. Wilkes was now alone on the window seat.
She could see his beard sticking up, and the blood. He was dead, of course.
But, since he had murdered Jane Waycross, I sincerely think he deserved to die.”

* * *

For several seconds, the
two listeners did not move. She had all too successfully conjured up this room
in the late ’seventies, whose stuffiness still seemed to pervade it now.

“But look here!”
protested Hunter, when he could fight down an inclination to get out of the
room quickly. “You say he killed her after all? And yet you told us he had an
absolute alibi. You said he never went closer to the house than the windows...”